Friday, January 09, 2015

Taki's Catholic faith, on Charlie Hebdo, and more

Taki's Catholic faith. Surprise of the day: he's a born Roman Catholic. Greece has had a Roman Rite minority for centuries, since Venice ruled part of it. There's also a smaller Byzantine Rite Catholic church, from a failed mission of the French Assumptionists about 100 years ago. I have to give the Greeks credit for enforcing their mirror true-church claim.

Also from Takimag: If there’s any “supremacy” in America, it’s the cultural supremacy of Frankfurt School-tinged leftism.

Burke for Pope: men don't like sissy religion. The sanctuary party at my vacation church, St. Ann's, Wildwood, looks like a Swedish Lucia fest: little girls in albs. I think St. John Paul the Overrated caved on altar girls later than 1983; sometime in the late '90s. Altar boys are JROTC for priests, chierichetti who are stand-ins for minor clerics.

Theden: If the courage of the martyrs is lacking in our generation, it is because the faith is for sale. It's not really for sale but as in ages past some churchmen treat it thus. As I like to say, young Catholics who no longer believe now just leave; they don't try to change the church, so despite their apostasy they're more orthodox than their Catholic liberal elders. Apparently the Diocese of Brooklyn has been trying to look cool (like Buddy Christ in Dogma) to get them back. "Fail" as the kids say. The Episcopalians are smarter than that, with their liberal high church: teaching church history, quoting the church fathers like an Oxford don 200 years ago, incense, and chant (St. Clement's, Philadelphia, still does the Tridentine Mass because it's a unique selling point). Observers of religion who are paying attention have noticed that the young who still go to church want strong doctrine (the liberals fear American evangelicalism, I guess because it's doing fine, thanks) and, in liturgical churches, conservative practice, a foundation of Western culture. As Pope Benedict XVI "the Great" has forecast, the American church in 50 years will be Cardinal Spellman's New York again only very small. But, being the church, not just a chaplaincy for an ethnic group or social class, still trying to (re-) evangelize.

More on Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Philadelphia (partly the Catholic faction formerly of St. Clement's) having High Mass at our cathedral: I hope they'll be able to adjust well to Catholicism. Catholic Philly has never been hoity-toity like the Episcopal set. Some were born outside the church; some were born Catholics who came back; others had come into the church at one point and have returned. St. Clement's was both my refuge from the Novus Ordo in the '80s and my bridge back to the church in the '00s. Understand that old-school St. Clement's wasn't typically Episcopal; these were Tridentine Anglo-Papalists, serious would-be Catholics. Which is why they're not in the ordinariate. So what you see is the Mass they've always done. Extreme Anglo-Catholics tended not to be hoity-toity Episcopalians, who are liberal. St. Clement's was one of the most extreme in America: prayers for the Pope and occasional all-Latin Masses. Pope Benedict undoing American Catholics' militant anti-high churchness just enough, and at the same time the rector of St. Clement's turning out to be liberal, brought them in a few years ago. All those Roman Catholic things they were doing and saying all those years? They really believed in them.

On Charlie Hebdo:

"It's not a cutesy, more risqué version française of The Onion." Bill Donohue: Those who work at this newspaper have a long and disgusting record of going way beyond the mere lampooning of public figures, and this is especially true of their depictions of religious figures. Chances are most Americans, still religious at heart, don't realize how anti-religious Europe has become. Not "spiritual, not religious"; anti.

Catherine Alexander on Facebook: There seems to be much murky thinking regarding the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Except for the terrorists themselves and their supporters, we agree that the massacre was an evil act which cannot be justified. Beyond that, though, it's troubling how many people, especially Christians, don't get that we can condemn the terrorists without making heroes out of the dead cartoonists who blasphemed God (not Mohammed, God). It's troubling how many Christians are willing to say "I'm personally opposed to blasphemy, but... I support [your blasphemy] as free speech," etc. We can support the First Amendment as a good and necessary restriction on our government and, at the same time, practice restraint and discernment in our personal speech, and encourage others to do the same. Christians should be leading the way here, yet many of us are jumping on the "Je Suis Charlie" bandwagon. All we can see is our hatred for terrorists, our love for freedom of speech, and our affection for underdogs. We can't seem to think beyond that. We seem more willing to defend free speech than we are to defend God. Indeed, we don't even know what true freedom is, or what it's for. H/T to Michael J. Russell for this thought: should "pointing a gun at someone confer de facto legitimacy" on him? If instead of Charlie Hebdo, the terrorists had attacked the pedophile organization NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association), would we change our Facebook and Twitter avatars to theirs? Would we say ‪#‎IAmNAMBLA‬? Well-meaning Christians and their apostates, secular humanists, nicing themselves out of existence: distortion of Christian values.

Steve Hayes: A Western fundamentalism of "freedom of expression." There is not a reaction to human beings being killed. It is rather that it was seen by many of the pontificators as an attack on "freedom of expression." The almost identical reactions to the Charlie Hebdo killings and the Pussy Riot affair makes this quite clear. There seems to be a huge reaction, quite out of proportion to the events themselves. Yes, it is horrible that 12 people were killed, but how many people were killed by Obama's drones last week? Why doesn't that stir more than a murmur of protest, and that only among those far from the centres of power in the West?

Alternative Right: The internationalist Leftist elites that have ruled Europe since World War II have failed. They have failed not just by our high and exacting standards, but by their own low and sloppy ones. They have created the very world that they most feared, and generated a situation that even they are now coming to realize is unsustainable and impossible. Import Mohammedans in your war on other, conservative whites, and get wiped out yourselves.

Bob Wallace: It’s too bad the words “sin” and “virtue” even exist, because they don’t get across what the words really mean. “Sin” comes from the archery word “hamartia” and means “to miss the mark.” It means to miss the mark for yourself, but has come to mean some sort of moral condemnation from God, usually for reasons defined by modern-day Pharisees. “Virtue” comes from words that mean “strength” and “power” and also “man.” It’s also related to the Greek word “arête,” which means “excellence.” What sin and virtue really mean, then, are weakness and strengths that people have within them, that help or hinder. Good points but course there is objective truth, not just "missing the mark for yourself." There is no "my truth," just truth. The Bible's clear that God judges. The church is also clear that mortal sin is not only grave matter but with sufficient reflection and full consent of the will.

On the passing of Bottom Dollar. Bought by the less impressive Aldi, they're all closing in six days. I had one in walking distance, closer than my regular, nearly top-brand market, and appreciated the convenience (except the Soviet-style standing in line), the prices, and the real service this business gave to the poor. So thanks.

1 comment:

Harvard Business School actually has a published case study kicking around somewhere about an old ad campaign by the Archdiocese of New York; the basic implication was that piles of ad money were utterly wasted because the Archdiocese didn't bother to do any of that tedious "market research" stuff that precedes any good secular advertising. If executives at Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay, or Toyota approved campaigns as useless and poorly-designed as those routinely approved by Catholic bishops, heads would unquestionably roll.

"[S]hould "pointing a gun at someone confer de facto legitimacy" on him?"

Reminds me of one of something Chesterton said about those killed during the Reformation and the European religious wars- we remember most victims as "martyrs" to one side or the other, but a lot of them were just plain old deranged psychopaths who weren't particularly missed by anybody (e.g., John of Leiden).